Faery Lands of the South Seas
by New York: Harper & Brothers. 1921. 8vo, 355 pp. Illustrated. $4.00.
IT is a long way from Faery Lands of the South Seas to the great voyage of Commodore George Anson, who sailed north from the Horn to Mexico and west to Asia; and the narrative of Anson’s voyage is, of course, not properly included in South-Sea literature anyway. But there are worse ways to approach the literature of the South Seas than by reading Anson; for, circling the South Sea Islands in that vast bight, he gives a sailor’s view of the Pacific on the eve of the greatest period of South-Sea exploration. Next read the narratives of, say, Byron, Carteret, Cook, Wilson, and Wallis, whose direct, simple stories preserve the genuinely primitive life of a hundred and fifty years ago; then, the books that our own adventurous sea captains of the early nineteenth century wrote when they left the sea to devote themselves to letters, that last resort of superannuated seamen; then the books of Herman Melville; and then, in natural sequence, the South Sea books of our own day.
The old narratives have the strength and directness of the seafaring men whose travels they record. Salt and tar preserve their pages; quaint episodes and broad, genial humanness give them lasting interest. They are the solid fare — the roast beef and plum pudding — of travel; and by the odd contrasts in which they abound, they add materially to the interest of the books that follow them.
It is not unfair to say, in comparison, that the South-Sea adventurers of to-day are dilettantes. Certainly they have not the larger imagination and resolution of the old circumnavigators, who are represented in our time by such men as Peary and Amundsen and MacMillan. But certain things that they have to offer, the older writers never dreamed of; and those things lend new interest to such a book as this.
They result partly from the changes that the outside world has made in the islands, partly from the writers’ point of view. Native superstitions and traditions are more easily unearthed than in days when languages presented greater difficulties; and now, when cannibals are fewer, adventuring among the islands has become more a fashionable sport than a serious business. So, in the spirit of a summer holiday, and with sympathy and humor, Messrs. Hall and Xordhoff have sketched the episodes of their travels. Native potentates, Chinese storekeepers, peripatetic traders, whole villages of amphibious men, women, and children sporting together in the clear water, give the book color and life.
But above all, it is the wandering white men that Hall and Nordhoff met, who reveal the peculiarly modern and romantic side of island life. Crichton and his search for loneliness, the scholar in silk pajamas and gold-rimmed spectacles who lived at the edge of the taro swamps, Warner and his gallant son, the nameless Englishman and his story of buried treasure — they are figures to stir the imagination. Throughout all the islands there was no one like them in the days of Anson and Cook.
CHARLES BOARDMAN HAWES.